From Coda To Prologue
by MoonMargaret
Summary: Merlin has always stayed by Arthur's side, going where the king would have him, for destiny had dealt the two as one. But in death, Merlin could not follow. What choice then remains, but for Arthur to return? Destiny can be for only so long denied. Occurs post-5x13.


**Disclaimer: _Merlin_ is not** **mine.**

He was dying.

He was dying, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it.

The first time that he'd been dying, he'd panicked. After all, Arthur was going to come back, and if he wasn't there to help him, what on earth was Arthur going to do? By that point, Merlin had already managed to outlive most of the people that Arthur had known, leading Merlin to believe that he was truly and terribly immortal. But he was so _tired_ and his bones _ached_ and his eyelids were heavy and he would have welcomed it all, after so much time and so much loss, if only he hadn't spent the last eighty years convincing himself that it was okay if he was immortal because he had to live forever for Arthur. But now he was _dying_ and if he was dying, then the last eighty years of sadness and loneliness and rationalization had been nothing more than…sadness and loneliness. He had lived long enough to know that everyone whom he had loved had died—even if he had not been in Camelot to bear witness—and long enough to believe that he would someday be able to help his fallen king, even now…he had lived long enough to convince himself to hope and look forward, and now he was dying and everything was stupid again.

So Merlin hadn't been very happy that first time. Decades of self-imposed exile just seemed silly if they hadn't been in wait of something extraordinary. He would have raged and shouted and summoned Kilgarrah if the damn dragon hadn't already died so that he could blame someone who quite literally was incapable of harming him and thrown something of a hissy fit that would have been undignified if he had anyone left to see and judge him for it. He would have done all of those things, but he was so _tired…_he'd thought that just becoming an old man—a _real_ old man—was bad enough, but the helplessness of dying of nothing than his body being worn out, when he'd survived punches and stabs and poisons and all manner of natural and supernatural weaponry that the world saw fit to throw at him was just awful. His final thought, that first time, was that he wished that he could have just died when Arthur had rather than wasted all of this time on his own, sulking and mourning and waiting. He was too far gone to even find it slightly ridiculous that he was begrudging his death by wishing that he'd met it decades before, when he'd been young and healthy and not even thirty years old. But he didn't have time to realize the irony, and he died.

Then, he woke up. He woke up, laying where he had lain as he'd taken his last breaths, wearing the clothing that had become customary as he'd grown into an old man, the stick upon which he'd had to lean to even walk on the ground, just out of reach where he'd dropped it as he'd fallen to his bed for what he'd believed to be the very last time. But he wasn't an old man, and he hadn't fallen to his bed for the very last time. He was young and healthy and not even thirty years old. He was as he had been when Arthur had died and, for the first time in a long time, he wondered if the whole idea of himself and Arthur each being the other's other half was a bit more literal than he'd usually interpreted. Two sides of the same coin…Merlin had died, and now he was back, just as he had been when Arthur had drawn his last breath.

Of course, once Merlin had realized that he had truly come back from the dead, he rushed to the lake of Avalon. It wasn't far; even as he had traveled all over the five kingdoms following Arthur's death, he'd always returned to Avalon. Just in case. Still, as of late, the distance had felt very great to the joints that were over a century old. Now, young once more and positive that his own rebirth meant that Arthur's time had come again, Merlin all but flew down to the shores, waiting for some sign that the king was returned. He wasn't sure what it would be. Arthur's funeral boat reappearing, Excalibur being brandished or even hurled at him by the Lady of the Lake, signs of life on the far-off island to which Merlin had never been able to bear a living Arthur…there was no telling what it would be, but Merlin was ready.

So, on the morning after Merlin's first death, he sat on the shore of the lake of Avalon, leaning his elbows on his knees and setting his jaw, and waited. He waited all day and all night and even through the next morning, tired and cold and hungry and hopeful, despite it all. Yet as the midday sun rose and Merlin became aware of his body—dead it may not have been, it still had human requirements—and had to face the fact that all that he had seen occurring on the lake over the past day involved bugs and wind on the water. Perhaps he was wrong. His coming back and de-aging had nothing to do with the king returning. Perhaps he _was_ immortal and, as did a phoenix from the ashes, he could die as many times as he wanted to. He would always come back, and as he was when he'd lost the other half of himself.

Well, he thought to himself, at least he was young again. Then, he hung his head and wept as he hadn't since the day that he had sent Arthur's body out into the mist. He wept for his fallen friend and for the dreadful fact that he was _hoping_ for some terrible catastrophe just because it would mean that the king would have to return and for the implications of his immortality and for the future that he _would_ have to face, whether he liked it or not. He literally had all the time in the world.

He just let himself weep for as long as he wanted to. There was no one to see him cry, and it wasn't as though he had anything better to do. So he wept and waited and lived and that was the first time that he'd died.

The second time had come more quickly, which was nice. It was speedy enough that he did not have to face the fact that he half hoped that he would just stay dead this time rather than come back and be unnatural because immortality just wasn't _right_ and to have to keep _waiting_ and have the first time just be a fluke. He died quickly enough that he didn't have to wonder what it said about him that he wanted to prove his destiny wrong by staying dead. He was just glad that it was happening quickly.

As it happened, so was the man who had speared him through the heart. There had been plenty of attempts on Merlin's life through the years, and he'd developed a reputation for being rather difficult to kill, as well as a reputation for being rather...brisk with his retaliations. So now, when people tried to kill him, they tended to hope to succeed on the first try. This man finally had managed it, sneaking up on Merlin. When he came back again, Merlin would be slightly embarrassed. He'd only been in his sixties that time, and he shouldn't have allowed someone to sneak up on him. But then, the look on his would-be killer's face as he sat up, yanked the spear out of his chest as he de-aged and scowling grouchily, was something of a balm. He fled faster than Merlin would have believed possible.

And Merlin was alone as he sat up in the forest, pulling the collar of his shirt forward so that he could get a good look at the wound that probably wasn't there, healed as he had returned to life. No one was there to hear him swear at the fact that this shirt was ruined with a damn hole in the front. If he'd just gone and died like a _normal person,_ he wouldn't have to deal with another wardrobe change. But he'd died and come back again and he supposed that that was all of the proof that he'd need and at least he was young again...but this time, he was aware enough to realize something that probably would have broken his heart if it could have still been broken further. His body was that of a young man not yet thirty. But he was still as old as he had been the first time that he'd died, as old as he had been the second. His body might be young, but he was still so old. Nearly two hundred by that point, if he had the proper grasp on what year it was. He was old. And it was terribly sad, to be so young and yet so old.

Anyhow, he was getting bored and, if he cared to admit it, just a little bit resentful that Arthur didn't hurry up and resurrect himself. So what if Albion wasn't about to collapse in fire and brimstone or be washed away in boiling seas of blood or be razed by enemies that could only be faced by the Once and Future King? It wasn't as though he could have just marched up to the current monarchy and demanded the crown. Besides, it wouldn't have killed Arthur to pitch in and help with a few of the more minor problems from time to time.

Although he _was_ already dead. Not for the first time, Merlin wished that Kilgarrah had been a bit clearer on the rules of resurrection when he'd told of the true meaning of the title of "Once and Future King." Would Arthur come back as he was, rise out of the waters, cranky and confused and probably rusty, because Merlin hadn't thought to remove his armor before sending him out in a rickety boat? Or would Arthur be reborn as a child, and Merlin would have to track him down? Would his spirit just take over another man's body? Merlin very much hoped that it was the first of his three scenarios. Not only would it be much easier to find Arthur if he was in his old body—Merlin could just _see_ what a nightmare it would be if he had to quiz every random blond male that he saw on obscure facts of Arthur's life to see which was the true king—but Merlin knew that his own heart would beat a bit easier if Arthur came back as…Arthur. Merlin would have felt a bit less awkward if he tried to embrace a child or man whose face he did not know, even if the soul was Arthur's.

Besides, he wasn't always sure whether he wanted to hug Arthur or punch him for leaving Merlin waiting like this. Granted, it probably wasn't Arthur's fault, but Merlin did have a lot of time on his hands….

But now, hundreds of years later, Merlin was dying yet again, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it.

Over the past few centuries, he hadn't made a particularly big deal out of it. He'd just tried to find some secret place to die and come back so that he didn't terrify whoever happened to be in the same room. Magic had become more myth than fact as time had passed, and Merlin had found that it was easier to hide it from most people than have to explain why he had died and then woken a younger man. It would have been quite a story and, although he certainly would have had time enough to tell it, he did not for a moment entertain the fancy that anyone would listen to him long enough to do anything beyond call a mental hospital to check him in. So, though it certainly wasn't _illegal_ anymore, Merlin kept his magic a secret. It wasn't so bad.

Nowadays, the worst part of dying was dealing with the aftermath. He'd have to move away from whatever comfortable home he'd found for himself, knowing from experience that it would be difficult to come up with a convincing story about how the elderly man had disappeared, only to be replaced by a younger fellow who happened to have the exact same habits. As time had passed, people tended to think "murder" before they did "magic." So now he was going to have to _move_ and it was going to be _irritating_. Of course, he _was_ in his eighties again, and it would be nice to be able to maneuver staircases without clutching at the railing or taking one of those damn escalators that he—even after all of this time—tended to avoid like the plague.

Not that he'd actually managed _to _avoid the Plague. He'd died of that one as well. But still. Why take mechanical stairs when you could take normal ones? Escalators just seemed to be more dangerous than they could possibly be worth. The edges were so _sharp..._

Elevators, on the other hand…Merlin liked elevators. Even when he was young and had strong enough legs to climb story after story of the buildings that were _so_ tall, he liked to take the elevators. There was always pleasant music playing and the buttons almost always lit up when he pressed them. He liked riding in elevators, although not everyone seemed to share his enthusiasm. He had gotten some very dirty looks from other passengers whenever he'd push all of the buttons, just to see them light up, but he supposed that they just didn't understand the miracle of it. He may have been alive to have seen the elevator come into existence, but they didn't see how wonderful it was. They hadn't known running through cold castles, carrying a torch and trying not to light themselves on fire as they hurried up and down crumbling staircases to pass messages. The modern buildings tended to have distinctly less grandeur than had the castle at Camelot…but the elevators and lights and heaters were still pretty nice. Merlin had the perspective to see that.

Besides, who didn't like buttons? They _lit up!_

Merlin smiled to himself, despite the fact that he was dying. He supposed that it said something about his life over the last several centuries that his dying thoughts—once far more profound and serious—were about the pleasures of pressing buttons and having central heating, as they called it. What was the point of having woeful recollections or wishes or regrets? He was just going to come back again.

Although he was a bit puzzled this time. He wasn't sick, like he had been with the Plague and influenza and the time that he'd spent his life eating whatever the hell he wanted because he was going to come back anyway (then regretted it when he'd experienced what heart attacks truly felt like). He wasn't wounded, like the spear to the chest or the crossbow bolt to the chest or the time that he fell down a hill and smacked his head on a rock or fallen off of Aithusa because he'd wanted to see how long he could fly without his hands on the dragon's back. It wasn't anything natural, like when he'd chosen to freeze to death when he'd noticed a few frostbitten digits, preferring to die and come back rather than live the rest of that life without half of his fingers and toes, or the time that he'd ended up drowning in the lake of Avalon just because he wanted to see if some magical creature would rescue him. He wasn't even that old this time. Nearly ninety, he thought, but he'd lived far longer. There wasn't anything really _wrong_ with him.

Except for the fact that he was dying.

He lay back on his bed in a shadowy dimness. Twilight was descending, and he hadn't bothered turning on any of his electric lights when he'd entered his bedroom. Having recently returned to his small home, he allowed his bag to slide off of him, shucking his knit hat from his head and closing his eyes to wait. To wonder. To wish. To think of the cheerful brightness of those elevator buttons when they were pushed.

And then, Merlin died.

Again.

When he opened his eyes, something was different. It had been night when he'd been dying, but now the sun was shining through the windows of his bedroom. Time had passed. He frowned. That had never happened before. He usually came back as quickly as though he had begun to nod off and shaken himself awake again immediately, no matter the circumstances of that particular death.

He pushed himself up on the bed and saw that everything in the room was in complete disarray, books flung away from their shelves, cabinets opened and overflowing, drawers wholly ejected from his dresser, clothes on the opposite side of the floor from the corner where he always threw his dirty clothes until he actually ran out of clean clothes, shoes all over the place, and thin shards of glass sprinkled on his body and on the bedspread around him. The overhead lightbulb had shattered.

He'd done magic.

A thrill ran through him.

Heart beating quickly, Merlin glanced at the mirror opposite his bed. It was cracked, but still more or less intact. He was young again, he saw, his hair black and frowzy, his skin rosy and smooth, his eyes clear and blue. He looked as he'd looked a hundred times before, grown into once and then resurrected over and over again. But something was different. He got up and approached the mirror, hearing crunching noises beneath his feet from the debris on his carpet. Something was different. He looked…brighter, somehow. As he inhaled, it almost felt as though his lungs suddenly had more room in his chest to breathe, as though a great weight had been lifted from him.

And then he knew.

He sighed and coughed and laughed out a sob, hysterical for a long moment to the extent that he had to brace himself on his desk.

But there was no time for that. Merlin took a few more very deep breaths and collected himself.

As calm as he figured that he was going to get, he was about to hurry out of his bedroom before the voice in his head—the voice that had actually managed to learn a few things after being alive for more than a few centuries—reminded him that there were a few precautions to be taken. He stripped in a matter of seconds and rummaged through the mess on his floor until he found clothes that fit his younger body. They were a bit out of fashion by now, he knew, but he would look less ridiculous in them than he would in what he had been wearing as an old man. Besides, if anyone say him exiting the tiny house who actually _knew _him, he didn't want to look as though he was a stranger wearing the old man's clothes. There was enough of a resemblance between his young body and his old one that he could usually get away with playing the son or grandson, depending on how old he'd been when he'd died. As a second thought as he straightened himself up in whatever the young men had been wearing sixty years ago, he pulled a large bag with long handles from beneath his bed. It was thick and heavy and would do the trick, he thought. After all, if it so happened that he was going to retrieve Excalibur, among other things, it wouldn't do either of them any favors for him to parade down the street clutching a huge sword. Especially if he was dragging someone along behind him.

Oh, he hoped that he'd be dragging someone along behind him.

He shrugged into a jacket that more or less fit and left his home. He tripped over the bundled newspaper on his stoop as he hurried out. It was rather thicker than usual, and he knew that something terrible must have happened since he had last died. What other reason could there be for this? But that was okay, he thought, a strange buzzing in his ears. Something wonderful was happening too. He didn't bother to pick up the paper. It would still be there for him to trip over when they got back.

He jogged down the street for a few minutes. This lifetime, he'd had to move a bit farther away than he would've liked. There hadn't been much of a choice. Only so many old men could die and then be replaced by younger dopplegangers in a four-block radius before someone was going to notice something. Still, in what felt like no time at all, he felt the cooler breeze that meant that he was close. Relishing the feeling of his young body, he dodged traffic easily enough and approached his destination, breathing hard.

The lake.

He stared, motionless, for a few moments, shielding his eyes from the sun on the water. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and it all seemed so dreadfully _normal_ that Merlin thought for an instant that perhaps he was overreacting to his most recent death and that nothing odd was happening at all. It wouldn't have been the first time that he'd misinterpreted something out of desperation and gotten his hopes up. Maybe this was just another instance of Merlin wishing too hard for something that was yet to come.

But then, about a quarter of the way toward the island, something in the water moved.

It wasn't a splash. Even with the sun-glare in his eyes, he could see that much. Splashing would have implied…activity. At first, he thought that it might have been Excalibur, extended from the surface of the water as it had been on the first occasion when he had fetched it from the depths of the lake. But it couldn't be Excalibur. Even covered in guts and gore, Excalibur had never required so much as a polish. That sword would have been gleaming in the sunlight. Besides, he wasn't even at the shore yet. There was no way that the Lady of the Lake could have known that he was there to begin tossing weaponry in his direction.

It wasn't a fish. It was bigger than any fish that would have lived in this lake, certainly. The lake wasn't all that deep, overall, and from where this…ripple had begun, it was far too shallow for any sizable creature to swim. It probably wouldn't have gone past Merlin's chin, if he were so inclined as to plunge into the stupid lake in the middle of March. Besides, it wasn't even really _moving._ It was as though something had just been let loose from the bottom and floated upward.

Then, Merlin saw. He shut his eyes for half an instant, wondering how he could have possibly thought that this would be easy or convenient. When had anything with them ever been easy or convenient? He opened his eyes again, half-hoping that he was wrong.

But there, out in the water, the sun shone onto armor that Merlin could easily recognize, even now. The whole body was an eerie sort of green, half-sunk and half-illuminated by the sunshine. It was him.

He was out in the water, apparently unconscious.

He was out there in the water, apparently unconscious, in the middle of March.

He was out there in the water, apparently unconscious, in the middle of March, and there was no boat.

As the years had passed, Merlin's language hadn't changed much. He'd learned to rearrange some of his wording and use more contractions. His accent had softened a bit, but there were few of the more modern phrases that he generally adopted. He had lived for a very long time, and "slang," as it was called, seemed far too temporary for him to embrace. Still, there were a few words that had worked their way into his vocabulary, mostly for the sake of sounding like a relatively normal man rather than an immortal sorcerer from ages previous. Some, though…there were some _cruder_ words that he spoke from time to time. Life as an immortal man who had faced a lot of very different deaths had taught him that some of the curses that he knew from his early life were somewhat insufficient for being hit by an automobile three days after a previous death. Or meeting half a dozen different Arthurs in a single day. Or seeing the coronation of a new monarch. Some things were just too frustrating to be sworn upon by anything other than a few more modern four-letter words.

And when Merlin saw what had floated, face down and motionless and armor clad and beginning to _sink_ from the weight of it all, to the surface of the Lake of Avalon, he used one of those four-letter words.

He used it rather loudly.

Then, he shucked off his jacket, kicked off his boots and plunged into the lake in which he had once drowned.

_It just _had_ to be in March, _thought Merlin distantly, shudders running through his body and he plunged forward, not having the time to acclimate to the temperature. _He's had a thousand years, and he just _has_ to come back in _March.

So Merlin, the immortal, the aged, the most powerful sorcerer to have ever walked the earth, dignified in wisdom and ever deathless, swore and half-strode, half-swam through the waist-high water to grab the king before he went and drowned himself before he could be properly reincarnated, feeling more like his young self than he had since before Arthur had died. It was so stupidly familiar that he would have smiled if the timing hadn't been so inappropriate.

He could only hope that there were be time for that later.

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**Thank you for reading! I'm sure that fics like this are probably a dime a dozen right now, but I'd still appreciate any reviews. :) **


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